Captive who wouldn't leave Guantanamo has change of heart at door of Europe-bound plane

Carol Rosenberg

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: Detainee Mohammed Bwazir's fateful decision to stay in a cell at Guantanamo rather than start anew in Europe came down to a calm, 10-minute stand-off when the warden of the war-on-terror prison urged him to board a cargo plane carrying two other captives to new lives.

Bwazir, 35, feared going to the unnamed country that offered him sanctuary and waffled before he was due to depart after 15 years of US military detention without charge. He'd gone through the formalities of leaving the base and about a week's segregation with two other captives and was shackled at the ankles, wrists and waist at "the bottom of the ramp of the aircraft', US Army Colonel David Heath said on Tuesday.

Military guards exit an area known as Camp Delta at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba this month. After 14 years, the detention centre is winding down. Photo: AP

The Yemeni captive "made it clear that, 'I do not want to leave. I want to go back to my cell.' So that's what we did," the still surprised colonel said of the January 20 episode. "It was disappointing."

Bwazir is one of 91 prisoners at the sprawling detention centre that US President Barack Obama wants closed. In years past others among Guantanamo's almost 800 captives have rejected certain offers of third-country sanctuary, and subsequently left voluntarily. But none has been known to make it that far – through health checks, would-be host country and International Red Cross exit interviews – all the way to the steel-grey ramp of a US Air Force cargo plane.

A protester wearing an orange jumpsuit depicting a Guantanamo Bay detainee, participates in a rally outside the White House in Washington last month that called for the prison's closure. Photo: AP

"He wasn't angry. He wasn't acting out. He was very calm," said Colonel Heath, who commands the detention centre guard force. In keeping with prison camp policy of anonymity, his description of the strange event never once named the captive. But Bwazir's lawyer, John Chandler, of Atlanta, did the day it happened, saying the Yemeni feared going to a country where he had no family and knew no one – in remarks echoed by prison staff in interviews this week.

Mr Chandler, himself still disappointed three weeks later, was one of a series of Americans who tried to persuade the Yemeni to start anew in southern Europe. But the lawyer said he understood that Bwazir wanted to go only to family in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates or Indonesia. There, he has a mother, brothers, uncles and aunts.

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The State Department's special envoy for the closure of Guantanamo said that episodes like Bwazir's would not impede his efforts to empty the detention centre. In fact, Lee Wolosky​ said he foresaw scenarios where a captive could be forced onto a plane and sent to another country.

"We're not a travel agency. We're not here to fulfil every wish and desire of a resettlee," Mr Wolosky told the Miami Herald.

"They do not get to pick and choose where they go. In certain circumstances, a detainee would be forced on to an aircraft in order to complete a resettlement that has been negotiated by the Department of State and run through and fully vetted by the interagency and notified to the Congress by the Secretary of Defence."

Since such transfers are considered sensitive diplomacy, it was unclear whether countries offering sanctuary to willing captives would be asked whether they'd take an unwilling former captive for resettlement before putting him on the plane.

Dawn arrives at the now closed Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. The camp was used as the first detention facility for al-Qaeda and Taliban militants who were captured after the September 11 attacks. Photo: AP

In the weeks ahead of one of the most astonishing choices in the history of the detention centre, Mr Chandler urged Bwazir by phone and sent a sympathetic lawyer already at the base to counsel him. The prison's Muslim cultural adviser, who blamed "negative influence around" Bwazir, had a navy doctor give him Arabic-language information off the internet about the would-be host country. US diplomats also got him a letter of assurance from the country that family members could meet him there.

"He had concerns along the way and vacillated back and forth," said the navy doctor, a captain who specialises in family medicine. Departing detainees can experience "anxiety of the unknown, not knowing whether they'll see family members or not" after what he termed "a very stable, very steady, very consistent" detention centre setting where the captors make life decisions for the captives.

A detainee is seen in the communal area inside Camp 6 at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this month. Photo: AP

Experts consulted by the Herald described it more like a sense of helplessness after years of institutionalisation. Two noted that Bwazir would have been 20 or so at capture and spent nearly half his life in detention, without charge.

"You may feel safer in the bad situation you are in than in an unknown," said JoAnne Page, president and chief executive of New York's Fortune Society, which helps US prisoners transition back into society. "It takes tremendous courage and a leap of faith to go to a country you don't know. There are still people at Gitmo he knows."

Plus, the navy doctor theorised, "they see what happened in Europe a month or two ago and it makes them wonder what the reception is going to be like".

No prison official or US diplomat would name the would-be host country. Nor would Mr Chandler, who described his client's decision as lamentable. It wasn't a place to fear, he said. "It's a country that would be a good place for you or me or a person from Yemen to go to."

Mr Chandler said it might have made a difference if Bwazir saw and met someone saying, "I'll be here when you get here." Still, he was confounded. "Every other man down there who I know says, 'Send me anywhere. Get me out of Guantanamo.'"